“In my world, you don’t get to call yourself ‘pro-life’ and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater.” – Thomas L. Friedman, Why I Am Pro-Life [via nytimes.com]

About Robert Farago

Robert Farago is the Publisher of The Truth About Guns (TTAG). He started the site to explore the ethics, morality, business, politics, culture, technology, practice, strategy, dangers and fun of guns.

I have no idea why anyone listens to this self-styled ‘intellectual.’ His observations aren’t keen, his prognostications are invariably wrong, and he has a fetish for totalitarian government (ie, Communist China).

And his book “world is flat” is pure junk. At the time it came out I was a manager in one of the largest global companies and witnesses first hand how the no borders services move to where they are cheapest approach devastated companies and the quality of their products.

Liberals have no concern over facts. The fact is 100 rd mags. are not all that reliable. If someone made a 1000 rd. mag. that was too big to actually use and jammed after the first 3 rounds the liberals would claim it to be the biggest threat to civilization.

Love me an ar, but I guess I really do disagree with a hundred round mag. I don’t see it’s purpose other than what it was used for here. Keep it in the hands of the military. Some weapons/accessories really shouldn’t be sold to the public. IMHO

You are completely wrong. And the 100 round magazine did not help him–it jammed before he even got through what a standard capacity magazine would have held. He abandoned the magazine before it was even half empty.

But with your mindset, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to let facts get in the way of what you feel is a “reasonable” restriction. Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

What the psychopaths do should not result in restrictions for the rest of us. How are so many homicides committed in gun-free zones? How about your paradise, New York City, or Chicago? Laws against murdering people in cold blood did nothing to stop him, why would extra laws with lesser punishments do so? It’s a totally flawed way of thinking.

Lol are you talking to me? All I said was one thing. And apparently I’m tantamount to mikebface. Never said it helped either. You put a lot of words in people’s mouths. It’s a poor habit and makes you look foolish.
Isn’t it proper training to switch magazines? Wouldn’t it be better to achieve proficiency with a weapon with its proper tools? All I want is a reasonable argument for the application of a beta mag in citizen hands. Excluding plinking.

I’ll pick up that gauntlet.
1. Fun. Pulling the trigger multiple times is multiplicative where fun is concerned. I enjoy it, everyone that I’ve ever taken shooting has enjoyed (safely) unloading a full magazine at a target. For its own sake.
2. There are several shooting sports and competitive events that require or benefit from “high-capacity” magazines. Whether it’s 40 or 100 rounds, having more shots on tap before having to reload can cut one’s time in such events and improve your score.
3. On a practical level, the difference between firing 100 rounds from a full magazine and 100 rounds from 3 40 round magazines is relatively small, especially with a little practice switching mags. Even a novice shooter can cut the comparative difference in 100-0 between a full stick and a series of smaller magazines to a matter of seconds. So restricting “high capacity” magazines provides no meaningful practical advantage while limiting fun, competition, and capitalism.
4. As has been previously stated, the larger the capacity of a magazine, the greater the probability that the gun will jam. Within certain design limits, you can expand a magazine’s capacity, subject to the feeding mechanism and spring pressures at play. But at a certain point one starts experiencing diminishing returns. After 30-40 rounds, the chance of a failure to feed increases far out of proportion to the theoretical benefit the higher capacity might impart. That’s why our troops don’t have 100 round magazines; they want their guns to work consistently. From that standpoint, you’d actually be better off allowing such magazines, since they would be more likely to reduce a shooter’s theoretical capacity than increase it.
5. The requirement to prove a need isn’t part of the American value system. Look, if I wanted to buy grenades, I can see the concern. Thing is that citizens own and will continue to own guns. The argument I hear all the time is “What would you do with that?” I don’t have to have a practical purpose to justify ownership of property. Therefore my response is why not? The reality is that limiting magazine capacity has been proven to have no appreciable affect on violent crime one way or the other. If limiting a magazine’s capacity isn’t going to make people safer then why shouldn’t I own a 100 round magazine?

Please note that I’m not trying to say that a theoretical 100% reliable 100 round magazine wouldn’t impart some benefit to a shooter. What I am saying is that the benefit conferred is only relevant in a competitive environment and not in an active shooter scenario. The practical time saved with a higher capacity magazine can be measured in seconds. That isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference relative to the arrival of law enforcement.

I do need a house as big as mine is. While supporting my mother at 24 I need the finished basement in my ranch. Also I do need free speech. And my privacy is my own. I don’t make my private life public nor put info where Uncle Sam can get it. I don’t see the need for a hundred round mag. Can you enlighten me.

I’m all about the protection of Innocent life. How this ignoramus cannot tell the difference between protecting a helpless person and using my gun to take out an attempted mass-murderer(or throwing the switch on a convicted murderer) is beyond me. At his age, if he can’t tell the differance between the terms “guilty” and “innocent”, then I despair of him EVER achieving a cogent thought.

The govt. has no right to tell its citizens how to live; be it guns, abortion, drugs, etc. If they arent infringing on others rights, then leave them the heck alone. If they impact others lives, punish them when they do it.

It’s always based on feelings in the end. As gun owners and enthusiasts we have all sorts of logic and facts on our side (in fact, almost *all* of them), but that’s not all we have. Ask yourself why the Second Amendment is worth defending, and you’ll find all sorts of emotion packed around your facts.

It always looks like the other side is emotional and unreasonable because they’re emotional about different things. (There’s been some pretty interesting research done on this.)

As far as I’m concerned, Greg Camp and JoshinGA are on the right track: I may hate the thought of abortion, but I don’t think that I or the government have the right to force everyone else to abide by my personal beliefs.

Now there is some silly logic. If there were some 2A excercisers in that theater, the whole situation could have been a lot more pro-life. Of course not for the shooter. But I’m sure everyone would have been OK with that.

The thing that is starting to bother me is that every time I see a QOTD it’s almost always some idiot spouting the same rhetoric in another forum.

Are there NO proponents of 2A rights other than us crazy paranoid cop-wannabe unstable internet lunatics? Even the NRA isn’t standing up in the public forum to defend its members, and I KNOW they’ve got an army of PR people. Surely some politician somewhere has stood up and promoted constitutional carry with some pithy soundbite.

The positions of anti-abortion, pro death penalty for some murderers, and pro use of firearms for self defense are all pro-life positions which value and protect INNOCENT LIFE. Friedman’s mind is confused and incoherent (and always has been).

So he’s pro life huh? Well then, he should choose not to have sex then, because that’s where his ability to influence anything ends. The idea that men (or anyone, really) should be allowed to tell a woman what they can and cannot do with their bodies is asinine. God forbid anyone ever dies from anything when they can starve to death instead after the population exceeds our resources.

I don’t like abortion yet I will not vote against a woman having access. A woman should not expect society or other members of her insurance plan to subsidize it. If men or anyone do not and should not have the legal or moral right to force women not to have abortions then women have no right to demand men (her male partner) or society subsidize her for a child the male sexx-partner does not want. If pregnant women have the right to opt-out of motherhood then men have the right to opt-out of fatherhood.

Rewarding bad behavior encourages more of it. To paraphrase an old teaching: Being kind to the cruel is showing cruelty to the kind. Modern society needs to re-learn and practice certain past proven social behaviors if it wants to survive and thrive.

If a woman wants to play around, have sex, get pregnant, and have kid(s) outside of a stable marriage that offers financial and parental stability to children then that is her (usually immature) choice and responsibility.

A woman can choose to have a child.
She can choose an abortion.
The man cannot legally influence her either way.
The man is held financially responsible until age 18 or now 26 if the ‘adult-child’ continues living with the mother past age 18 for school and job training.
The financial burden is often so great that many men are unable to afford a later family of his own.

This. Women get full control over what happens if they get pregnant (or even if they get pregnant since they have several birth control options). Men get zero control over what happens if she’s pregnant – yet they’re expected to pay all the financial burden for it. It’s utter bullshit. The only way a man should be required to pay child support is if they were married or if they both wanted to have the kid and then later separated. Any other option means that the man had no say in the child being born and thus should not be held financially responsible for a decision he had no say in.

Can you imagine the outrage if men could make a choice women had no say in and force women to be held financially responsible for that choice?

@Brick – You even admit that a vasectomy and condoms only “mitigate the risk”. Why should women get to do anything they please and then ditch the kid if they don’t want it, yet regardless of if a guy wants the kid or not, he’s stuck paying a fortune for the next two decades?

As long as women don’t want to let men have any say in if they have an abortion or give the baby up for adoption, men who don’t want the kid shouldn’t be forced to pay for the kid. Remember the Revolution and “No taxation without representation”? Well this is the same thing – his income is being taxed on a decision he’s not allowed to have a say in, and that is bullshit.

There is nothing responsible about being forced into financial slavery over a decision you weren’t allowed to have any say in.

The idea that men (or anyone, really) should be allowed to tell a woman what they can and cannot do with their bodies is asinine.

Awesome. I now no longer need to obey any law that was proposed by or only passed because of women politicians. If men have no right to make laws governing women’s actions, then the opposite applies as well. I can say goodbye to almost all gun control, taxes, traffic laws….it’s a beautiful day!

I’m all for it: criminal background checks at time of purchase, new gun buyers voluntarily taking a gun safety and shooting class, expanding youth shooting events, police spending more time at the range firing under ‘stressful’ conditions, holding all parents and others responsible for when minors gain accesses to and misuse a gun, holding gun manufacturers responsible for malfunctions that cause injuries and death, etc.

It’s true that no one can justly dictate what another person does with their body… but the baby is not part of the woman’s body. It is a separate being with completely unique human DNA. Just because the baby happens to reside in its natural environment through no fault of its own (normally through the conscious actions of the mother participating in activities of which the natural consequence is pregnancy) is it justified to infringe upon that other person’s right to life.

Gee, the comments on this article are even worse.
“You know what: I’m willing to trade: gun control for severe restrictions on abortions.”
That is the magic of this two party political puppet show: if unchecked, both parties will eventually negotiate all of our freedoms away. I guess you can call me pro-death, for all I care.

Considering that most people who use their guns for public crimes and massacres lack common sense and are typically quite unstable mentally, I wonder from a pragmatic point of view, how much good ‘common sense’ laws would do under the circumstances anyway.

Should we not have laws against murder? Or is that forcing our personal beliefs on others?

It is a medical fact that a gestating child, starting at the very moment of consemption, is made up of human DNA uniquely separate from both mother and father. That means it is a separate, individual, human person that posesses all the same naturally inherent rights as anyone else.

Edit: Somehow my replies are all ending up as comments. This was meant for Ing.

Obviously the line has to be drawn somewhere — deciding where is the tricky part, when there are so many conflicting values and lines of reasoning involved. If you take either side far enough, you wind up in a pretty horrible place (anarchy one side, the Taliban on the other).

I figure society should err on the side of free will whenever possible.

Murder is the ultimate crime against free will because everyone has a right to exist and (presumably) the will to live.

Abortion is trickier. A fetus (child if you prefer) in gestation may be a separate entity from the mother in terms of its own unique DNA, but it doesn’t have free will. It can’t. It’s utterly dependent on the mother, unable to survive outside the womb or make its needs known or even to consciously *want* anything. At a certain point, consciousness must develop (and with it the rights of personhood), but pinpointing it is near impossible. So the way I look at it is that the mother has a prior claim to life. Until birth is possible, she should be able to exercise her own free will regarding her own self and body.

I’m pro-gun, pro-2A for similar reasons. At some point we all have to sacrifice something for the greater good — being part of society means you’ve accepted some limits to your own freedom — but the individual always has the prior claim. Without individual rights, we’re just ants.

“… it [a fetus] doesn’t have free will … or even to consciously *want* anything.”

Neither does a 1 day old infant or an adult in a coma. So with your standard anyone who doesn’t like the “burden” of caring for a 1 day old infant or a family member in a coma can legally execute that person or withdraw their support leading to the person’s death.

The problem with arguments of development, consciousness, viability, etc. is that they are totally arbitrary and subject to radical change as our understanding of humans and medical technology advances. And they enable modern day Hitlers to do what they do.

Well, you’ve got to balance that with respect for life — every living thing has the will to live, so ending another life for one’s own convenience is wrong. (This is why the idea of abortion is abhorrent to me.) But abortion isn’t just about that. There are two living beings whose existence may conflict.

Let’s look at the “burden” you’re talking about. What if the burden is a life-or-death matter? Is it right to keep someone technically alive yet permanently unconscious in a coma indefinitely? What if providing for an infant or a person in a coma would result in your own death (say, from starvation)? And what if your death meant nobody was left to care for the helpless survivor? Would it be better to give birth to a baby you’re not equipped to care for or not to have an unwanted child?

I’m not saying I have the perfect answers, just that allowing people to make decisions for themselves is usually the right way to go. Hitler’s evil was in trying to force the entire world to mirror his vision of what was right.

I would think that after embarrassingly demanding that the US go to war in Iraq to stop WMD acquisition and being proven wrong and then demanding that US companies outsource as aggressively as possible (“The World Is Flat”) by claiming that it will lead to increased wealth in the US, only to again be proven wrong, that no one would take anything Friedman says seriously.

Freedman is a flat earthe One World Goverment his mockumentaries were co-sponsered by Bill Moyers and played endlessly on PBS\
Bill Moyers LOVED him some Freedman because it gave him cover to have the MFG of all the Seseme Street toys in China. Moyers owns the MKTing rights to Seseme Street Franchise